What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fifth series, What Translation Sparks, a group of poet-translators share a seminal experience in translation. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
No one is poor in Ayodhya No one is unhappy in Ayodhya No one goes hungry in Ayodhya No one is robbed in Ayodhya No one is beaten in Ayodhya No one is illiterate in Ayodhya No one is an atheist in Ayodhya No one is cruel or miserly in Ayodhya No one is a slave in Ayodhya No one is sick in Ayodhya No one is old or crippled in Ayodhya No one in Ayodhya
After Valmiki’s Ramayana:Bālakanda, sarga 6
Note
The Ramayana, South Asia's most famous and influential epic poem, is everything from a love story to a darkly disturbing meditation on the doublespeak of statecraft and the failure of ethics. It exists simultaneously in countless continually reinventing free translations, both textual and performative versions in dozens of languages, so many that, as the poet Aditya Bahl notes, "there is no Ramayana as such, only its 'different tellings.'" Vivek Narayanan's versions after Valmiki often begin with close studies of a source text in the Sanskrit that is more than a thousand years old, but, in this tradition of Ramayanas, the poems are meant to be new, open, ambiguous and detailed conversations between the ancient and the present, the Sanskrit and the English, rather than what we normally think of as translation today.
"Every translation is a collaboration among many, including all those who have come to this terrain before you. I am indebted even to those translations whose approach I reject because they gave me the benefit of having something to reject.
If nothing is to be lost, something must first be gained."
"So, the most important thing happening is in the movement and in the crossing, in the transcendence, and the translator is someone who carries goods across the border, someone who, despite even their greatest moral fairness, will, in the process, smuggle more than what is written on the page, who will participate—whether they mean to or not—in contraband activities."
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